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Mark Hunter hiring moves Maple Leafs further outside the box: Arthur

The philosophical question went something like this: If you replace every part of a ship — the deck, the hull, the gangplank, the mast, every nail, every board, the whole thing — is it still the same boat? If no part of the original ship is there, what is it?

The Toronto Maple Leafs are rebuilding themselves under team president Brendan Shanahan. He has added a new assistant general manager, new assistant coaches, a new PR staff, and Tuesday, a new director of player personnel with a notable name. Mark Hunter was an NHL player for 12 years, and became a baron with the London Knights of the OHL. Now he’s coming to Toronto, and will oversee the team’s scouting and player evaluation departments.

“His reputation in hockey circles is as good as it gets,” said Shanahan.

It’s another move towards a front office with flexible minds. Hunter and his brother Dale turned London into a powerhouse over the past 14 years. There were whispers about how they did it, how they gamed the system. Maybe they did. But they won, and Hunter never stopped.

“A lot of times you see people, in any walks of life, they achieve some success and their work ethic begins to dip a little bit,” said Leafs assistant GM Kyle Dubas, who competed against Hunter as the GM of the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds. “And with Mark, I always marvelled that it was almost the opposite. When he won, he seemed to work harder the next year.”

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The Leafs liked that Hunter didn’t need to do this; that he could have continued to get rich in London, but instead wanted to take this job. (He won’t divest his ownership, so he will presumably continue to get rich.) They liked that he has an extreme competitive gene, and could evolve as a hockey mind. Hunter fought his brother Dale during the Good Friday Massacre brawl between Quebec and Montreal in 1984, and ran out tough teams in Sarnia, but London has often been defined by speed and skill — Corey Perry, Patrick Kane, Nazem Kadri. Toronto liked that he doesn’t hew to finding big players or small players; he wants good players, the best ones.

“I like skilled guys,” Hunter said. “It’s nice to have a skilled guy that’s big, strong, but they’re harder to find. If you can do both, I think you have something special. But everybody had doubts on Pat Kane (whom London drafted in the fifth round in 2004). If you would have seen him in minor midget, he was just a little mouse. And now he’s bloomed into one of the best. So you really have to evaluate where they’re going to go, and how good their skills are.”

Hunter is a hockey man, but like Dubas he searched for every edge. That included some work on analytics, which have in the past been derided by some as the sign of someone who doesn’t want to watch the game. A better interpretation would be that analytics are the sign of a hockey mind that wants to learn more about hockey, and in Hunter’s case that wants to discover something their competitors don’t have. Dubas did it in the Soo, and Hunter explored it in London with video, scoring chances per 60 minutes, zone starts.

“(He wanted) every edge,” said Misha Donskov, who was the assistant general manager in London from 2009-2012 and now manages Hockey Canada’s analytics and video. “Mark’s a 24/7 hockey guy. My cellphone would ring at 5 in the morning and again at 11:30 at night. He wanted every edge, and wanted to get better.”

“Someone with (the Hunters’) reputation, I didn’t think there would be a whole lot (of analytics) that he would be interested in,” said Dubas. “But intuitively, competing against him, knowing the types of players he coveted, I thought it would be a great fit.

“(In Sault Ste Marie) last year, we were young and relatively skilled, and everyone said you’ve got to get bigger, you’ve got to get older. And at the trade deadline, talking with Mark, he said, You’ve got to just value skill. You can’t buy into different narratives — you can’t just get older because (people say so). One of the things Sheldon (Keefe, Greyhounds coach) would say was, a bad older player is still a bad player, and a good younger player is still a good player, and same with size, and all the other things people go crazy about.

“I found it interesting that one of the Hunter brothers, who was a very tough player, could change from being that, and being very successful with that and the way he coached . . . and I think it’s that ability to adapt that always fascinated me about Mark.”

It’s not that Mark Hunter is guaranteed to turn this organization in a better direction; he, Shanahan and Dubas are all learning on the job, and general manager Dave Nonis is adjusting his thinking, as well. Nobody knows how well they will all work together, and it will be up to Shanahan, who likes having competing voices and truth-tellers in the room, to make it work.

No, it’s that Hunter is another indication of the thinking that is now permeating this franchise. The Toronto Maple Leafs have defeated hockey men for generations, now. Time to adapt, one way or the other.

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